The Marais Breton Loire-Atlantique (Western France): a forgotten marsh labelled as a landscape

Abstract

This study about landscape and public actions in the Marais Breton Loire-Atlantique deals with the following subjects successively: the assessment of public action, the relevance of the Marais Breton as a space for intervention, and the landscape as an object for policies of intervention by the institutions who intervene in the Marais Breton. It leads to a first observation: on the one hand, there are no public actions with landscape among their main objectives, and, on the other hand, the Marais Breton's relevance is low as a space for intervention. It goes beyond this observation and analyses a two-fold process: 1) the institutions who intervene in the rural space are building the landscape as an object for intervention policies, in four registers - technical, cognitive, political, symbolic-; 2) the Marais Breton as a space for intervention, is qualified in four ways - naturalistic, agricultural, hydraulic and landscape. It concludes with a discussion about the possible ways for the future, and notably with the necessary inclusion of the farmers to define specific landscape issues, in order to avoid the landscape being reduced to a simple " principle " or some " small technical standards ".